Trophiesby
Chris Dee

Ancient History

Antonio Cosagliozzo arrived in Gotham in 1810 from
Cerami, Sicily. His emigration documents were incomplete, but Antonio was
no fool. He had brought a few baubles to fill in the gaps in his
paperwork. A silver ring and a cameo slipped to the sympathetic translator,
the latter passed along to the less sympathetic clerk, solved the
bureaucratic formalities as they always had and always would. Antonio left
the Castle Island processing station as Anthony Cerami, but he walked out
onto American soil. He had no sentimental attachment to his new name, so
when the time came to set up his own business, he wanted something more
meaningful. If he had been born Anthony Cerami, if it was the name of a
father whom he loved, maybe he would have felt a sense of pride attaching it
to the jewelry he produced. But as it was, Cerami was merely a town that
wasn’t promising enough to go on living in. One of the largest and most
beautiful estates in Cerami was owned by the Falconi family. The name might
mean nothing to the wealthy of Gotham, but Antonio knew the aristocratic
splendor it implied. For him, that was enough.

The pieces Antonio made were exquisite. Not the
costliest jewels in Gotham, he had no means to compete for the largest
diamonds and rubies needed to create such pieces, and he didn’t particularly
want to. Instead, he fashioned more modest gemstones, along with
semi-precious corals, lapis lazuli and onyx, into miniature masterpieces set
in delicately etched gold. Antonio had two sons, neither achieving his
level of artistry but both were competent craftsmen. The business did well
enough producing simple variations on the founder’s original designs for
more than a generation—until the war years. Three of the Cerami heirs
were killed in action, a fourth in the influenza epidemic that followed. A
fifth came home too scarred and bitter to care about a family business. But
the twenties were filled with survivors who wanted to feel alive again after
the horrors. There was a heedlessness in the air: women with shingled hair
and short skirts, men flush with new fortunes playing the stock market. It
was no time for a storefront in the Diamond District to be sitting idle.
Every flutter in the highly volatile radio stocks brought a virtual flood of
buyers into The Street, and John Cerami’s widow didn’t intend to waste the
opportunity. She had a storefront and a name in Falconi’s. What she lacked
was merchandise. So she began buying wholesale. It might not be “artistic,”
but it was faster than trying to make the stuff. And her customers
certainly didn’t know the difference.

When the final “flutter” of radio shares in October of
1929 ushered in the Great Depression, Falconi might have gone into a decline
but for the purchase made on September 3rd by Nathan Everidge
III. On that day, the Dow reached a record high of 381.2 and Everidge came
into the shop to select an engagement ring for his bride. He expressed his
view that the situation with the stock market was out of hand, the market
could not sustain itself and the speculators were pushing them all to
ruin… He looked around as he said it, and he remarked that shares might
rise and fall but diamonds at least would always hold their value. Almost
on a whim, he bought a pair of loose stones as “insurance,” joking that he’d
probably have them made into earrings for their anniversary. After the
crash, when the retail market all but vanished, Mrs. Cerami kept the
business afloat making discreet purchases from families that had to sell
their valuables and selling the loose stones as a safe and portable,
easily-hidden investment to those who still had fortunes to transport and
hide.

It was enough to sustain them through the Second World
War. The end of the war brought a boom in engagement ring sales—and a
refugee named Cesaro Pitronaci. Pitronaci arrived in Gotham with little
more than the shirt on his back, but by 1981 when Carlotta Cerami died
childless, he had amassed enough to buy Falconi Jewelers from the squabbling
cousins fighting over her estate. By the time Falconi Jewelers caught the
eye of Oswald Cobblepot, the whole neighborhood was calling him “Mr. Falconi.” Cesaro didn’t mind; it was good for business. For a jeweler,
there were few things that added respectability like a brass plaque on the
door reading “Since 1823,” but one of those things was a white-haired old
man behind the counter who answered to the same name as the sign above the
door.

Cesaro was a skilled jeweler, so he renewed the
practice of buying loose stones, gold and silver, and fashioning his own
pieces. He still kept the Cerami wholesale contracts for watches, pearls,
and the like—which is how he came to the Penguin’s attention. In those days
before the Iceberg Lounge, Oswald had to rely on opportunistic henchmen, and
Vulture was as greedy as they came. He’d somehow got himself a job driving
for a delivery service and was trying to work out how to switch IDs with one
of the bonded guys who got the valuable payloads. He got as far as
Peterson’s route map and saw the regular deliveries to Falconi’s. He was
pretty sure a falcon was some kind of hoity-toity bird, and he knew Penguin
paid well for any tip that had to do with birds or feathers. It was a lot
easier pounding faces for Cobblepot than trying to figure out a way around
the delivery service safeguards, so he took the info to Penguin and let the
better man do the thinking.

Oswald watched Falconi for three months. He soon
realized the wholesale stuff was inconsequential. Falconi admitted a
diamond courier every Wednesday morning at 7 o’clock precisely, and he paid
in cash. The falcon was a particularly regal bird, and ice was common
underworld slang for diamonds, so he felt this was a target worthy of the
Penguin’s nefarious attentions. He told Vulture to get himself a
conspicuously big gun, the kind that would scare an old man like Falconi and
avoid any nonsense.

Unfortunately, before he could act on the idea, Batman
packed him off to Arkham—kwak! But then fortune intervened:
Two-Face, the crusading D.A. turned coin-flipping crime boss was arranging
some kind of hearing to overturn his conviction on the grounds that
apprehension by a faceless vigilante lunatic violated his civil rights. He
invited Oswald to be a second petitioner, which Joker unfortunately
overheard and invited himself to be a third. Harvey objected, naturally,
three being an odd number, but he was overruled—twice. First by his coin,
and then by Joker punching him in the nuts.

The hearing was a wash. The Bat’s existence wasn’t
well known at the time, and the judge called “the alleged incidents
with some imagined Bat-Man” irrelevant. Citing overwhelming evidence
or some such rot, he dismissed the petition and denied the appeal. What
Oswald objected to most was that word “imagined.” How the judge could look
down on a man with a still-broken nose and declare the breaker of that nose
an imaginary urban myth—kwak!—it was literally adding insult to
injury. He was just saying as much on the ride back to Arkham…

“Adding insult to injury—kwak—that’s what it
was.”

…when the van was liberated. Catwoman had landed on
the roof; they heard that much. (Joker thought it was rain.) She somehow
incapacitated the guards and drove them all to freedom. She did it for
reasons of her own, of course. Oswald didn’t know what they were, and he
didn’t care. He was free to pick up where he left off: relieving Falconi
Jewelers of all that precious ice, a substance that a penguin had more right
to than a falcon, surely—KWAKWAKWAKWAKWAK!

He picked up Vulture and his equally large and imposing
colleague “Vinnie.” Oswald wasn’t crazy about the name, but it was already
Tuesday night. With a diamond courier heading to Falconi’s in a few short
hours, it was more important to have a second goon today than one who would
answer to the name Raptor tomorrow. So Vulture and Vinnie it would be, even
if it did sound like a live-action Disney movie.

It was hours before dawn when Vulture, Vinnie, and the
Penguin arrived in the Diamond District, giving themselves ample time to
deactivate the alarm and go inside while it was still quiet and dark.
Vulture found the plan hard to grasp, being the sort of scraggly bird who
would rush in when the place was crowded with customers, wave his gun around
and yell for everyone to get on the floor. More than once Oswald found it
necessary to thwack that empty head with the point of his umbrella. It
wasn’t a particularly bird-like maneuver, but it was the only way to make
the Vultures and Vinnies of the world pay attention: They were going in
early, before the store opened—kwak. They’d get Falconi first
when he arrived for the day—kwak—with the cash payment for the
courier. They would then take their time cleaning out his current
inventory—kwak-wak—and finally, they would wait for the new diamonds
to arrive at seven. Nothing about it was difficult to
understand—KWAK-WAK-WAK-KWAK-WAK-WAK-WAK!

While Vulture went to work on the alarm, Oswald tried
to convince himself that head-thwacks administered by an umbrella
could be seen as a bird pecking with its beak. That was a common way to
exert dominance among the feathered, after all, and correct wayward behavior
in the young… Except at that moment, Vinnie went bumbling under the
streetlight where anyone looking out the window could have spotted him.
Oswald thwacked him once again, and seeing his shadow stretching so far
back to achieve an overhead blow on the much taller man’s head, Oswald was
forced to conclude that there was nothing ‘peckish’ about it.

Still, they would soon be inside, waiting for an old
man to arrive with a briefcase full of cash that would feather his nest for
quite some time. And then, before long, a younger pigeon would come along
with a case full of ice. That would be enough to make him a happy, happy
bird…

It didn’t exactly go as planned. First, Falconi was
already there when Oswald and his men got inside. What’s worse, he wasn’t
alone. At Cesaro’s age, it was getting harder and harder to get up at five,
get dressed, and get down to the store for that 7 o’clock rendezvous with
the courier. It was also getting harder to bend down to reach the lower
shelves in the safe. So, in the time Oswald had been in prison, Cesaro had
made a few changes to his routine. He left the store before the banks
closed on Tuesday, withdrew the cash and spent the night at his store,
sleeping on a couch in his office. He’d also hired Stefan, and Stefan was a
good kid, grateful for the job. He’d stayed late “to help with the
inventory,” but really, he was worried about Mr. Falconi being alone in the
store with all that cash.

When Penguin’s men burst in, Stefan grabbed the phone
and took it with him into the storage closet. Vulture spotted the cord and,
following it, found Stefan himself. Before the lumbering goon could finish
saying “must’ve called the police,” Batman was crashing through the
skylight—Batman who should have been busy with Joker and Two-Face still at
large, not to mention whatever Catwoman was up to. Kwak-wakwak-wakwak.

Then The Cat herself arrived—as if this simple little
nest-raid wasn’t already crowded with extra beaks—and swung right into the
middle of things before Vulture could plug Batman. Oswald was too smart to
stand around wondering what had gone wrong. He simply repeated to himself
what the Catwoman herself once observed: a penguin can’t fly the coop, so it
was time to waddle. He helped himself to Falconi’s waiting briefcase full
of cash and made for the door. A whipcrack later and the hellcat was
swinging towards him. Try as he might to slash at her with his umbrella,
she vaulted right over his head and past him. Then, with another crack of
that whip, something went wrong with his ankle, and he was sailing head first
into a 40,000 carat “diamond” of… well, Oswald couldn’t say what the display
gimmick was really made of, but it was hard and it hurt—kwak.

In the years that followed, Falconi’s seemed to lead a
charmed existence. All of Gotham came to know that Batman was more than a
myth, and the places where he was known to have foiled crimes were seen as
unlucky by a certain type of criminal. Others noted the similarity between
the Falconi name and that of rising crime boss Carmine “The Roman” Falcone.
Nobody wanted to risk crossing Carmine, and there were plenty of other
jewelers in town…

It couldn’t last forever. The yakuza scoffed at
Bat-superstitions, perhaps unwisely, and their new boss made it clear that
he’d welcome a chance to insult Falcone. One of his more ambitious men took
the hint and brought in a specialist to tackle the security at Falconi’s
Jewelers. It had improved exponentially since that ancient Penguin attempt,
but even the best Diamond District systems would crack under Miyamoto’s
expertise.

It was not “Date Night” and Catwoman was not
“patrolling.” She was prowling as she always had. Tonight it was the
Diamond District. Despite the superior merchandise on Fifth Avenue, the
Street had better security. The prize or nostalgia might bring her to
Cartier, Bvlgari, Van Cleef & Arpels or Tiffany, but when she wanted to
exercise, it was the Diamond District. She took her usual route to the top
of Shenoa & Co, which had the best leap over the traffic cameras to her
favorite niche between the Gotham Jewelry Center and the Gotham Jewelry
Exchange… when she saw some odd scrapes in the concrete. The mark of a
traditional zipline… Well, not quite ‘traditional,’ but the sort that anchored
the line of a cat burglar without her claws, whip and specialized gear.

Whoever it was, their placement was perfect, and
Catwoman couldn’t help but be impressed. They’d found this optimal spot,
which she herself had taken more than a week to pinpoint, and they hit it
from the perfect angle. She was curious to see where they were going and
followed the trail to the half-dozen blue awnings that made the string of
independent stores at the corner look uniform and unified.

Then she sucked in her breath as she saw the Rickart
Box on the 4th floor window directly above… above… Oh, meow.

It was an average night. Dick had done a good job
covering Gotham in his absence. There was no sign that the underworld had
noticed Nightwing patrolling instead of Batman, and if they had, they
certainly hadn’t been emboldened by the change. So it was an average
night. A meth lab, a jumper, a lead on the location of Riddler’s new lair.
Oracle had gone quiet. She’d found a cyber-crime ring operating out of an
unlikely location, an innocent-seeming bakery in Chelsea, and she was quite
preoccupied with her find. She answered whenever Batman spoke, but he could
tell from her tone it was an unwelcome interruption. So he’d let her be.
He watched over a pair of undercovers making a gun buy. They didn’t spot
him, of course. He simply watched from distance, making sure the deal
didn’t go bad, and once they made their arrests, he moved on. An average
night, until…

..:: Batman? ::..

Selina never used the OraCom. She’d answer if you
called her, but she never initiated contact that way.

Batman wasn’t sure what to expect when he answered, but
it wasn’t… it couldn’t be… a heads up on a jewelry store robbery in
progress?

Once she got close enough to see the Japanese cat
burglar, Catwoman realized he must be Miyamoto. She could also see he
wasn’t equipped to leave the way he’d come, not with a briefcase full of
cash or a sack full of loot. She guessed he was just there to get in, turn
off the alarms from the inside, and admit others who would do the actual
burgling: the kind of specialist job she’d be offered twice a year when she
was working and had always turned down.

So… three or four locals and an out of town specialist
who wasn’t even armed… Hardly a challenge. There was no way she could keep
them dancing until Batman showed up, and there would be no point taking them
all out herself before he got there. The only way to make it work was to
delay the confrontation. So she followed Miyamoto through the upper floors
of the building next door, rerouting each of his reroutes so he had to
circle back. She chuckled as she heard him cursing the timed resets he
couldn’t find. She wondered if she would be doing the same, searching madly
for a mechanical timer instead of considering the possibility of a human
player undoing all her careful work.

She sank into the shadows and waited, remembering.
“Yo down there. Tall, dark and handsome! Long time, no see…” It took
them fifty-eight seconds to wipe up Penguin and his men all those years
ago. “…And I told you I could help.” Fifty-eight seconds.
“The Penguin! He’s getting away!” “Take over for me and he
won’t get far.”

And this time, there were no civilians to worry about.
She decided she’d wait until Batman was about two-minutes away before she
let Miyamoto reach the final alarm. Then he could get into the actual
Falconi building from its taller neighbor, and she would use the same perch
she had last time, over the skylight.

“Yo down there. Tall, dark and handsome! Long
time, no see…”

The same skylight he had crashed through, so her
entrance wasn’t as showy. With all of the glass already broken, none of
them heard her coming. That hulking brute pointing his gun at Batman had no
idea what was coming until the whip wrapped around his arm and yanked his
aim up to the ceiling. Then

“Yo down there. Tall, dark and handsome…”

She told him she could help. She told him. And then
she proved it.

“The Penguin! He’s getting away!”
“Take over for me and he won’t get far.”

Damn him.

She watched Miyamoto make his way through the showroom
and into the back… let in his men… all three of them (yawn)… and get
to work on the safe… He was good, might get it open sooner than she
expected, but she wasn’t worried. Batman had a way of always getting there
before the last tumbler clicked into place. So she slipped back outside to
get into position on that little ledge above the skylight. Looking down
into the showroom, she noted the 40,000 carat fiberglass “diamond” had been
replaced by a modest pyramid of gift boxes. It was infinitely less tacky as
a floor display, but it wouldn’t be nearly as dramatic as a battle fixture.
But then, no one in that trio of yakuza would be as dramatic as Oswald had
been
crashing into it.

She chuckled at the memory and waited until she saw a
cape flicker at the end of the street, then she crashed through the
skylight—this time with the cacophony of shattering glass that marked
Batman’s entrance the last time. She snarled at the presumption of these
sad little men and snapped her whip like a cat lashing her tail, spoiling
for a fight—and Catwoman certainly was spoiling for the fight. Once the
tussel began, it commanded
her full attention—but the shift when Batman entered the fray was
unmistakable. It wasn’t anything you saw or heard. It was something you
felt: a violent vacuum across the room, sucking away her opponents’ focus,
pulling the weight from their blows, and… somewhat greedily… pulling the
actual man from the path of her final swing to deliver the coup de grace
himself.

“Show off,” she said dryly.

He grunted. And then… a different kind of vacuum
sucked the air from the room. The moment crystallized. It was where they’d
both stood on that night so long ago: silent, flushed from battle, a crew of
unconscious goons at their feet.

“Fighting together felt good, didn’t it?”
“It feels
good alone.” “But it’s better to share… Maybe I deserve one more chance.”
Then a kiss. And a “No!” Now, here they were again.

“Fighting together felt good, didn’t it?” she said
softly.

Silence.

Selina’s heart pounded in her ears, unsure why she’d
said it and unnerved at the lack of response.

“Fighting together felt good, didn’t it?” “It feels
good alone.” “But it’s better to share… Maybe I deserve one more chance.”
Then a kiss. And a “No!”

She turned, the weight of that old rejection crushing
her from the inside, and saw he was gone.

A Bat vanish?

Really?

REALLY?

This is why she told him about the robbery, wasn’t it?
This moment. This… closure. She could have taken one cat and his three
yakuza buddies out herself—or she could have ignored the situation
entirely, because one crime more or less in Gotham was not now, nor had it
ever been, nor would it ever be something she would lose sleep over! She
TOLD Batman that Falconi Jewelers was being burgled so he could come, so
they could stop it together, here, in the spot where they… where he… where
he REJECTED her offer to fight crime with him the first time. What the hell
was she thinking? Why the hell would she open herself up to this? And why
would he come if he—

k-tump

It was the strangest feeling, this sick, cloying
tension climbing up the back of my neck, spreading into this dizzy ache
along the back of my head. My stomach in knots. My heart pounding in my
chest with the same ferocity as this angry pulsing behind my right eye.
Reliving this utterly shitty moment, having no one to blame but myself for
the memory, but rather than Bruce there to take out the sting and give me
some closure, he up and VANISHES on me, and then k-tump

Martian Manhunter once told me my thoughts get “rather
loud” when I’m worked up. He told Bruce they were screaming when the awful
truth came out about the mindwipe. The volume was certainly cranked up in
those awful minutes since the Bat-vanish, but no cat burglar in the middle
of a closed jewelry store would ever let her raging thoughts drown out the
softest noise from the real world. k-tump Distant. From the back
room. I took a step to see what it was, when it repeated. A light… soft…
fiberglass… k-tump.

I took more than a step then, I took 14 steps very,
very rapidly—by which point I could see INTO the back room and took five or
six more at a dead run. There was a weathered wooden door open, with stairs
leading down to a basement (presumably), and coming UP those stairs was a
40,000 carat fiberglass diamond with the tip of two bat-ears just visible on
the figure behind it.

I know I let out some kind of noise that might not have
been too feline. It might have been called a girlish squeal, actually, and
I called out for him to let me help. It really looked like the diamond
display gimmick was too wide to come up those stairs and fit through the
doorway, but since we both knew the thing started out in the showroom, it
had to have fit through once.

He pushed, I pulled, and in less than a minute, we had
it on solid ground in the back room.

“Nice to see Ozzy’s head didn’t leave a permanent
dent,” I said. It was supposed to be playful, but it came out a lot softer
than I intended.

“I thought we’d take it for the trophy room,” he
graveled. And I don’t think I have ever sucked in as much air involuntarily
in a single breath before—except when I’d been drowning or was being
strangled in the moments before.
Maybe mistaking my silence for hesitation, he added “There should be
something of yours in there.”

Technically there was. He had one of my old costumes
and a frayed whip handle. But I understood what he meant. Those
represented the Catwoman who Batman fought. This would be the Catwoman he
worked with, Catwoman the… crimefighter. Technically there was something of
hers in there too. The second week I covered for him when he’d hurt his
back, I demoted Victor’s freeze ray to the back row of a display case and
stuck in a souvenir glass from the Iceberg. I certainly earned it that
night. But I know Bruce. That’s his cave, and if he didn’t put it there,
it doesn’t count.

It was really very touching. More than touching. I
knew I had to say something, so…

“I can’t think of anything more appropriate to say
‘me,’” I declared. “Great big diamond, right?” I said, knocking on the
side.

“I can’t think of anything more appropriate either,” he
graveled. He said it so seriously. It was clear he didn’t mean it in the
sense of ‘jewel thief’ the way I had. It was very clear he meant…

“That night,” I whispered.

He didn’t say anything more, just bored into me with
that silent intensity of his. Normally I love it. But right then, in that
store next to that diamond, it… it had echoes. “You’re just going to let
me walk away.” “No. It’s worse than that. I have to take you in.”

He didn’t of course. He just turned away, stood with
his back to me while I left. Didn’t say a word.

Just like on the ride home—with a 40,000 carat
fiberglass diamond strapped to the trunk of the Batmobile like a Christmas
tree.

Life is very strange sometimes.

“It’s taller than Robin,” I mentioned, mostly to have
something to say once we got it back to the cave. “It will fit right in.”

I meant figuratively—amidst an animatronic dinosaur,
8-foot playing card and 13-foot penny, the giant diamond fit right in. But
Bruce looked towards the Trophy Room and shook his head.